This weekend saw the first big movie news of the summer: the triumph of a horror film, Backrooms, over the latest Star Wars spin-off, The Mandalorian and Grogu.
The latter was supposed to be a full season of streaming television on Disney+; it became, instead, a disorganized jumble of spare plot parts that landed with a clatter in theaters over Memorial Day weekend. Meanwhile, Backrooms, a small-budget picture by a young internet creator, has done handsomely. The movie earned $81.5 million domestically at its opening last weekend—eight times what it cost to make, which, astonishingly, was one-sixteenth of what The Mandalorian and Grogu cost.
So, is the age of the spin-off dead? It’s deader than dead, in fact: It’s soulless, empty-eyed, and ripe with the stench of decay, stumbling along like some hideous monster assembled from the chewed-up corpses of beloved ’80s and ’90s classics. Nostalgia has its time and place, but the public is clearly a bit glutted with comic book and sci-fi retreads. One night of reheated leftovers can be fun; a steady diet of recycled meat loaf gristle has got to be unhealthy. At the Mandalorian and Grogu screening I went to, the trailers were 30 minutes of advertisement for yet more retreads. There was something unbearably sad about sitting in a sparsely populated theater on a Friday night amid other aging millennials, panning the shallow dregs of our collective childhood for one last nugget of movie magic.
So it’s exciting to see 20-year-old YouTube sensation Kane Parsons find success with a commentary on remake culture itself. The genius of Backrooms is in its dark satire of the compulsive repetitions and reboots that have dominated theaters since he was a child. The monster at the heart of the movie is the literal embodiment of all those childhood keepsakes, hoarded mementos, and worn-out tropes that we feel tempted to redigest and mush together time and again. Parsons has turned an online legend into a metaphor for our zombified age.
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